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Friday, 15 December 2017

ONE SHAFT OF LIGHT THAT SHOWS THE WAY

Last weekend, I took delivery of a piece of my childhood: an
Acorn BBC Micro computer. For an entire generation of British schoolchildren,
the BBC Micro, introduced in 1981 as part of a Government-backed computer literacy
campaign, cemented Acorn as a British technology success story for nearly twenty
years, culminating in the creation of the ARM chip, now found in billions of
devices.

Why did I buy a second-hand one on eBay, described as being “in
working condition, needs a clean”? Apart from having already bought another BBC
Micro eight years ago, sadly no longer working, I wanted to make some music with
it – the four-channel Texas Instruments sound chip installed in it is also
found in other 8-bit machines, but also many Sega arcade machines, the Master System
and the Mega Drive / Genesis. In addition, BBC BASIC, created by Acorn engineer
Sophie Wilson, is still the most versatile version of basic, with easy SOUND and
ENVELOPE commands to build sounds – Commodore 64 owners, in comparison, are
left to POKE their sound chips until they made a noise.

In a time when we expect our mobile phones, let alone our
computers, to be capable of more than everything, the BBC Micro, and other 8-bit
computers like the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the Apple II, and the Amstrad CPC464,
all appear to be as capable as the micro-controller chips you might find in
your alarm clock or hi-fi system. That is sort of correct: Acorn’s first
computer, the System I, looked like a calculator, was programmed directly to
the processor using hexadecimal machine code, and was developed from a cow
feeding system.

Modern micro-controller systems, like the open-source
Arduino or the Raspberry Pi, take computing back to the same nuts-and-bolts
principle of writing your own programs, and building your own devices. Using the
BBC Micro at school was Eben Upton’s inspiration for creating the Raspberry Pi,
and eventually led the BBC to produce the Micro:Bit micro-controller board,
returning to a computer literacy program when programming skills are needed
more than ever. The Arduino system was easy enough for me, an enthusiastic
bystander when it comes to computing, to consider building a type of electronic
typewriter, where you could enter text without the distraction of the internet,
and upload it to your computer later -however, the Alphasmart series of keyboards already did this, so I have
since bought one of them.

Likewise, the BBC Micro has been used as widely as the on-screen
ident generator for Children’s BBC, the steering controller for a radio telescope
at the Jodrell Bank observatory, and as a music sequencer on the Queen song “A
Kind of Magic.” My older non-working Micro could also save programs to SD card,
through the successful fusion of old technology with the new.

What did I make of my “new” BBC Micro? Erm… It turns out
there is a known issue where the capacitors in the internal power supply will eventually
fail, because thirty seconds after turning on the thirty-plus year-old machine,
the sound of firecrackers, made without any programming from me, was followed
by quite a bit of smoke. It would have been nice to make retro computer music using
period equipment, instead of resorting to attaching a music keyboard to my
iPad, but soldering capacitors is more than a bit beyond my capabilities – at least,
I did get my money back.